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Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Sartori in Stives (part one).....

Fanny rot and some sort of heart condition (which could either be belatedly revealed Asa Hartford hole in the heart about to scupper my 6 figure move from Birmingham to Manchester City syndrome or an incipient Peter Sellers post-honeymoon with Britt Eckland-style full-blown heart attack – I’m not sure) have now been joined by a decidedly unnerving blackening of the toenail of my right big toe. I foresee with grim exactitude the horrors of a long drawn out Bob Marley-esque demise brought about by my having failed to seek treatment early enough. I can see it now, pegging out a year or so down the line without even the dignity of a “well, it would have contravened her Rastafari beliefs to allow herself to go under the surgeon’s knife” type excuse for my untimely death, lower limbless and ganga free in a nursing home inna Babylon. Still, at least the time I spend worrying about the toe might reduce the time I spend worrying about the ticker. What was it Brecht said? “Vices have their point, once you see it as such – stick to two for one will be too much…” Or was it David Bowie? Mind you, Brecht was as silly as arseholes. “Where do the holes go when you eat Swiss cheese?” Fuck off. Which reminds me – I think I see Alan Yentob drive past me in his long shiny Merc as we sit in the shade at the rear of the Old Sloop Inn, St. Ives – or Stives as I later hear some young buck drawl in response to the obligatory mobile phone call gambit. Or maybe it was Rick Stein? Before I have the chance to yell out “a waxworks – in the bleedin’ desert?” to find out for sure if it’s the director of Cracked Actor or not, he’s half way back to his ‘Uppalong’ holiday retreat, whoever he is. (Uppalong used to be a small, tight knit community of miners’ cottages, ‘Downalong’ a tight knit community of fishermen’s cottages. They are both now tight knit communities of second homes for people in the Me-jar.) That Stein must be worth a packet, you know. He now has about half a dozen establishments in Padstow – or ‘Padstein’ as our brilliantined Cornish coach driver calls it when we take a day trip there – in between his unsolicited volley of lame Irish jokes. (Paddy orders a sandwich and when it arrives, he notices a wire hanging out of it. He says to his mate, “Oi tink we got a thandwich with a bomb in it ‘ere, Spike. Oi tink oi’ll call de po-leeth and thee what dey thay.” So Paddy calls the constabulary. “’Ello dere, is dat de po-leeth?” “Yes, sir, this is the police - what can we do for you?” “Now den, oi tink oi got one a dem thandwich tings wid de bomb in it thir,” says Paddy. “And what makes you say that sir?” “Well, hoffither, dere’s dith great long wire ting loik a fewth hangin’ out a de ting.” “Ah, now sir, you may well be on to something. Tell me sir, is it ticking?” “No thir, ith cheeth and onion.”) We see a lobster hatchery on the harbour front at Padstein. In this sleek, modern shed of a building one can presumably observe the life cycle of the lobster – from translucent, clawed homunculus to full-grown tile-red crustacean, plump, succulent and in fine fettle to be wheeled the short distance across the seafront to any one of the myriad of Stein’s emporia - there to be boiled alive for the benefit of some sock and sandalled arse from Salford so they can moan about being overcharged "just cos 'e's on the telly...and wur's me chur batter??". Saves all that faffing about with boats and pots and whatnot. Carbon neutral too, I shouldn’t wonder. To think there was just the one, original Seafood restaurant of his here when I came here with Strangely Brown all those years ago. 1995 – seems a lifetime away now. There are about twice as many pubs here now and it’s a lot more touristy than I recall it. The views across the Camel Estuary are stunning though. As the plum coloured sails of the yachts pull out from the beach across the water at Rock, you could imagine yourself to be in some inlet in Mediterranean Turkey, not staring out at the chilly waters of the Atlantic. Of course you’d need to be Alan Yentob or Rick Stein to be able to afford to live here in Stives. Or Frosty. Or Frostrup. We’d naively imagined that one of the options opened up by our bizarrely timed, Dylanesque dual inheritance – “they say I killed a man named Grey and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million bucks – and when she died, it came to me…I can’t help it if I’m lucky…” – would be to buy up a little bijou here for next to nothing and live off the interest of the whopping great lump sum we’d no doubt have left over, spazzing our lives away in a haze of local cider and wholemeal vegetarian pasties. Some chance. There’s nothing for sale here for less than we’re buying the place in D.... Road for. Not that it matters now, of course. The mortgage offer came through the day before we left for Cornwall so – barring our vendors getting cold feet or the searches turning up something ghastly – we should be settling into our new home before the summer is through. So that’s the next 25 years taken care of then....